The problem is basically that we want to categorise the mission as either success or failure, and yet there was no clearly defined metric for success, so everyone defaults to "if it blows up, it's a failure".
On the other hand, you clearly can't call it a complete success. There were three goals that weren't met: water-landing the booster, reaching orbit (or whatever you call where it was trying to get to), and water-landing Starship.
So maybe we should think in terms of a score out of 10. Like with gymnastics, there are degrees of difficulty. SpaceX aimed very high, and delivered...ok. Maybe give them a 6/10?
I think it's fairest to categorize most of it as stretch goals. They knew the odds of accomplishing all of them on only the second flight ever (and first with this staging design) were quite slim, but might as well be optimistic and have a plan for the small chance that by some miracle everything does actually work out perfectly. The first Falcon Heavy flight is a good example of what it looks like on the rare occasion when it all goes perfectly.
More broadly, SpaceX prioritizes low total cost and speed of development over everything else. That means they'll have more test flights than NASA and not all of them will be totally successful, and that's fine. The overall program will be.
To be fair, nasa has had more than half a century to accumulate ‘splosions. It’s part of the job. I’m certain spacex will have a catastrophe at some point because literally every nation with a space program has had them, and they are far more safety conscious then the VC move fast and break things curse that has taken over modern tech.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 had two (full) failures (in 2015 and 2016), but the crazy high cadence since then made it the safest vehicle in the history of spaceflight. The next vehicle with comparable safety was the Soyuz rocket (which had various versions of the same design from the 60's, and has been launched a total of almost 2000 times!), one version of which had a streak of 112 consecutive successful launches in the 90's, but sadly Russian space program has declined since (they have more and more reliability problems). The last (major) version of Falcon 9 has 100% success rate with 225 successes out of 225 launches.
NASA never before used a vehicle as reliable as Falcon 9, so... You can't compare crazy ambitious development program to established vehicles, and as Falcon 9 shows, given enough time, SpaceX can achieve something close to perfection.
I especially like how people act like SpaceX invented reusable rockets. These people simultaneously know about SpaceX and yet somehow don't know about the Space Shuttle, whose design started over 50 years ago.
By the end of the program, the space shuttle cost $1.6 BILLION per flight, or more than disposable designs.
There's no point in doing reusable if it's insanely expensive! The SpaceX innovation was actually making reusability pay off. Sadly the government contractors only ever had an incentive to make each launch as expensive as possible, which they absolutely accomplished.
Yes, but NASA has had the GOP looking over its shoulder trying to literally cancel it for decades (and not the "whiny cancel" that dudes throw around today, instead actual, real cancellation).
The GOP was ready to pounce on ANY failure NASA had as an excuse to cancel it, which is a large part of the reason for the huge safety precautions. The o-ring fuckup almost did them in.
If NASA was loose with regulations, they would have gotten cancelled, and if they are too strict with regulations, they get ridiculed. It's a lose-lose.
SpaceX has no such oversight, and the GOP loves Musk. A SpaceX rocket could kill a hundred people and SpaceX would just keep truckin' like nothing happened (recall, Musk has said repeatedly deaths are part of progress).
NASA had no such luxury.
I'm certain there was waste due to nepotism, but let's not pretend Musk isn't the beneficiary of the same nepotism. (It all should end, and hope some day it does, call me naive.)
That's where I was going. There's a bias in these discussions that overlooks a century of contributions (previous poster referred to them as perfection). SpaceX didn't invent space travel from square one, they are optimizing the last 10%: larger size, and better re-usability. Elevating them to gods pisses in the face of the century of previous experts who learned the hard way because there was no NASA before them.
I don't think anyone is elevating them to gods, and also, it's true that no one was seriously working on cheap reusability until SpaceX did it. Yeah sure SpaceX didn't invent orbital rockets (no one claimed they did!), but they did in fact invent commercially viable reusable rockets, and that's a big deal.
The largest rocket ever built got to space for the first time, powered by 33 full-flow staged combustion engines, considered to be the holy grail of engine design. First successful use of 33 engines firing in unison. First full-flow engine to make it to space. First methane engine to make it to space.
I’ve followed starship development for a while now. A year ago starship was doomed to fail because 33 engines firing at once would tear the rocket apart. Now it’s a failure because they screwed up the landing. I know this sounds crazy, but I think the rocket company known for landing rockets might be able to fix the rocket landing issue.
>First successful use of 33 engines firing in unison.
Well, fine, but that's a bit of a silly goal. I don't think there was any doubt that that would work, after the last test in which they all worked except for the ones that got damaged by concrete.
Also, they were already tested on the ground, so...technically already achieved.
> Now it’s a failure because they screwed up the landing.
They didn't "screw up the landing". Something went badly wrong with the booster shortly after separation. And Starship went off course.
Landing both the booster and Starship isn't some small "nice to have", it's fundamental to the operation of these craft. They didn't even get a chance to test landing either part, because both failed too early.
> A year ago starship was doomed to fail because 33 engines firing at once would tear the rocket apart. Now it’s a failure because they screwed up the landing.
I’m unsure what you mean by “screwed up the landing”, both stages exploded in flight.
Scott Manleys analysis and reasoning seems sound: that the error was likely due to hot staging burn causing damage or being mistimed causing propellant sloshing.
With all due respect, I think you still define it as a competition or veiled gamification.
The people at SpaceX are largely all scientists, engineers and the like and they build the best they could do with available data. It got them a lot further this time based on the previous data. That is the only metric that really counts. If they got good data they can use to “debug” the rocket (to speak in HN familiar terms) that is a great thing for them, and very valuable.
> Starship launches are clarifying events. Pretty quickly after liftoff you find out who understands the rocket business, and who are the casual observers bereft of a clue.
I love it when opinion pieces open with the equivalent of "What follows now is the truth. If you disagree with the truth, as presented by me, the arbiter of the truth, you don't know shit."
Berger must have really good faith in his arguments, if he feels the need to begin an article this way. And, unfortunately, what follows sounds more like a letter by an angry SpaceX fan than a quality analysis weighing the successes and failures of the start.
Just look at this text attempting to pass itself off as serious analysis of SpaceX.
> Since its heady days during the Apollo program, NASA has steadily become an agency filled with checkers, rather than doers... Part of the magic of SpaceX is that it's filled with doers, with relatively few checkers
The spacecrafts not full of people have the same problem. I don't know how you can look at something like the JWST, which was awarded to TRW as an $824 million 7-year development project and became a $9.7 billion 20-year project and not think someone should be in prison.
NASA is a prisoner to politics. Anytime it embarks on something there are 3 possibilities - success, failure and continuing to work on it. The first two end up forcing everyone to move on from a status quo that was the creation of time and effort that made the majority of interested parties happy.
I think a lot of the scepticism is a counterpoint to the unbridled starry eyed optimism. Building this thing is hard and will remain hard. Having achieved 80% is only a weak indicator that they will achieve the remaining 20%.
And yet every news for the past 5 years or whatever has been "wow it's a runaway success and basically done". Something flies? Great! Something blows up? Ooh actually that's even better because [convoluted argument] and Starship will fly in 6 weeks time.
I wish them well. The crazy optimism still strikes me as a bit mad.
SpaceX might succeed with Starship and it might fail but I don't think we'll be scratching our heads in 10 years wondering which will be case.
SLS? If in 10 years they're still spending money on it to launch it once every couple of years - if it's still in some sort of weird limbo between success and failure - I wouldn't be surprised.
You'd be right if it weren't for the fact that Elon Musk has a track record of succeeding where others basically insist things can't be done. Falcon 9 rockets being reused is a good example. Completely mad idea. Nearly bankrupted spacex. And now it's a routine event. Tesla now being a best selling car brand is another example. That didn't just happen by accident but is the result of a lot of engineering and planning. Like SpaceX, not everything went according to plan with Tesla and the company nearly bankrupted itself several times in the process of basically becoming the money printing machine it is today. The point is, both companies are still here and really successful at what they do after taking lots of early risk to get there.
Starship is a crazy idea. Completely nuts. And it could actually work. That's the crazy part. This was only the second launch. It took four attempts to get the first Falcon rocket to space. What we saw a few days ago was a rocket that nearly worked and only developed issues very late into the launch. Next time, they might get a little further. At this point it looks like there are a lot of challenges but none that look like they can't be overcome.
One thing is clear. SpaceX is very well funded and they should not have any budgetary constraints doing this over and over again. There are no 100% guarantees they'll get it right eventually. But it looks like they have a very decent shot at it. If they fail, it won't be for a lack of trying.
Yes it may well work. Yes, Musk is, one way or another, associated with these projects. That's not the point.
The point is, these things may still fail. No shame in that. The fact that Musk rolled a 6 on a die ten times in a row doesn't mean he always does that.
But the narrative around it completely denies it. Any outcome is an unmitigated great success and yet another proof that Starship will succeed and we will colonise Mars.
Good luck to Starship succeeding, but the crazy optimism, denialist of even a chance of failure is unbearable.
I don't think there's any concrete reason to be overly negative here. Also, I did point out that there are no guarantees. But he seems to have solved a few hard problems already. Including with Starship. Musk is not just "associated with", but a main driver of technical decision making in all of his projects. Give the man some credit. The narrative that he just happens to get lucky a lot doesn't stand a lot of scrutiny.
I don't think I've ever really doubted SpaceX could build such a rocket & eventually get it to work. But why? What is the commercial utility in such a large launch platform?
The utility is decreasing launch cost per kg by a couple orders of magnitude from the Falcon Heavy, which already represented a huge decrease from other launch systems. Decreasing costs to <1% of former costs seems likely to open a lot of new potential use cases.
If they can get reuse going and it's cheaper than flying a falcon 9, I think there's a lot of commercial utility. If you can put a 110 ton satellite into orbit for the current price of an 8 ton satellite, then you really don't have to worry about weight as much, which means you can use cheaper parts to build your satellite.
100-150 tons to orbit or the moon or Mars per starship. NASA is counting on it for lunar operations and Musk anticipates it being the Martian workhorse vehicle
He's pretty clear, he expects to be building a startship every couple days relatively soon after the design is successfully finalized so that they can launch a crap ton of them at mars to get a colony going (Which I think is dumb, figure out how to build a workable version of o'neill cylinders and focus on mining space and then moving heavy industry off planet into space to solve the pollution issue on planet.) In the near term there will be pretty heavy demand from starlink, as that platform is basically required to economically launch their larger, next gen satellites.
Humanity, from now until the sun explodes, will only get one chance to check mars for life. Right now the first samples are still waiting in tubes to get picked up from the martian surface. Musks' solution to the problem of contamination is to fire as many rockets as he can as fast as he can and hope to contaminate mars completely before anyone can red tape his ass.
We owe it to all future generations to make sure he never lands a single payload before the question can be thoroughly resolved.
Yes, lets retard human technological expansion to answer a fairly irrelevant question in the grand scheme of things, that seems prudent... While I think going down the gravity well on mars is stupid, it's stupid because there's no need to trap people there when we should be able to more closely approximate earth gravity and generate nearly limitless surface area while having access to more useful minerals with o'neill cylinders (or something along those lines). Ironically, this could go a long way to fixing the earth...
Also, it's really boring whether mars has/had bacterial life or not. If it does, then it rejigs the math on everywhere else, making it way more probable we find it elsewhere as well. That leaves us with it's either not there, so it doesn't matter, or it is there and it's probably in a lot of other spots too, so we'll find it on the next one, once we're actually established in space and multi planetary and the cost of not going to said next one isn't as high as holding the whole species up from getting off this rock into space permanently. The only situation where it actually matters is the very slim chance it's both there and deadly to humans in a way that makes it likely the astronauts make it back to earth and contaminate us all before it kills them.
Well for one thing they’ll be able to launch 240 Starlink satellites at a time instead of just 60 on the Falcon 9. If they get to the point of reusing the booster and the second stage the cost savings with Starship will be significant over the Falcon 9.
Likewise, AT&T licensed the transistor to a small Japanese startup and told them it would probably only be useful for making a hearing aid. Fortunately, Sony had a knack for finding consumer applications of the device and humanity now makes quadrillions of transistors every year.
From "Technology Importation, Corporate Strategies, and the Rise of the Japanese Semiconductor Industry in the 1950s" at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256067/pdf
> In March 1952, Ibuka traveled to the United States to investigate its domestic tape-recorder market and to learn from American firms. It was during this trip that Ibuka ran across a WE newsletter announcing that AT&T was openly licensing its transistor patents for a nominal licensing fee of $25,000. Literally overnight, he decided that transistor radios should be Sony’s next major product. ... Iwama and Tsukamoto, along with three other researchers, officially began Sony’s transistor-development project in July 1953, just months before the company signed a patent-licensing agreement with
AT&T (Sony Corporation, 1986, p. 325).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor points out AT&T "first used transistors in telecommunications equipment in the No. 4A Toll Crossbar Switching System in 1953" and "The first prototype pocket transistor radio was shown ... from August 29 to September 6, 1953."
A quick look of publications of the time finds articles like this August 1952 piece from the Illinois Business Review :
> The Electronic Department of the General Electric Company reports that a whole new electronics business is growing out of the development of the transistor, said to be a potential successor to the vacuum tube. Transistors are made of germanium, which is recovered as a byproduct in the smelting and refining of zinc ores. Since they contain no heated element they never “burn out” and last indefinitely. The giant digital computers, or magic brains, which now use several thousand vacuum tubes and occupy a large-size room can conceivably become small enough to be applied to everyday business and industrial problems as are comptometers. Most of the telephone, industrial control, and business machine applications can be filled by the transistor; it will become practical to build amplifiers for use on transoceanic telephone cables. The simplicity and ruggedness of the transistor will have a direct effect also on military electronics, especially on airborne equipment.
or this October 1952 article on some of the uses of transistors - https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n137/mo... with the subtitle "look for them soon in pocket radios and TVs almost that small" and the comment " RCA has just announced that it has boosted the frequency of several units high enough for use in FM radios and TV sets."
My source was Chris Miller's /Chip War/: "Upon landing in the United States in 1953, Morita was shocked by the country’s vast distances, open spaces, and extraordinary consumer wealth, especially compared to the deprivation of postwar Tokyo. This country seems to have everything, Morita thought. In New York, he met AT&T executives who agreed to issue him a license to produce the transistor. They told him to expect to manufacture nothing more useful than a hearing aid."
Certainly many Americans were aware of and were chasing the potential of transistors almost immediately. This is not incompatible with management at the top being slow to grasp same.
The "Technology Importation, Corporate Strategies, and the Rise of the Japanese Semiconductor Industry in the 1950s" link says it was Western Electric ("the manufacturing arm of the Bell System") who did the licensing, so it technically should have been WE executives, yes?
That may be a minor point, but you can also read that after Morita signed the patent license, he "returned to Tokyo with a few sample transistors, a piece of high-grade germanium crystal, and a copy of Transistor Technology."
What was Transistor Technology?
"After the first symposium, WE began to license the patent rights to manufacture transistors to anyone willing to pay a fee of $25,000, which was “to be applied as an advance against any future royalties [usually 2% of sales].” This was the news Sony’s Ibuka Masaru heard when he arrived in the United States in early 1952. After the second symposium, the company published the two-volume Transistor Technology—a compilation of articles by key researchers at Murray Hill and Allentown—to be provided to its patent licensees (Riordan & Hoddeson, 1997, pp. 196–197). By 1952, most major U.S. companies, including GE, Raytheon, Texas Instruments, and Westinghouse, became WE licensees (Transistor Technology Symposium, 1952)."
I can hardly think the WE execs thought all those licensees were going to make hearing aids at best.
While I don't have a copy of Chip Wars handy, archive.org has a copy of the 1989 book "The Chip War" by Fred Warshofsky. At https://archive.org/details/chipwarbattlefor00wars/page/62/m... you can read how Ibuka told the WE engineers he wanted "to make the world's smallest radio. He was laughed at." The frequency characteristics were too poor for radio. Sony ended up having to develop the ground-junction transistor to solve that noise problem.
I think a fair reading is that WE did not think Sony could do anything with the transistor regarding voice or music beyond a hearing aid as they knew their transistors couldn't handle the bandwidth. We can read that WE needed convincing to provide a license in the first place because "Technology Importation ..." writes:
"When he finally got in touch with WE, the U.S. company reacted suspiciously to small, unknown company from the Far East. WE asked Sony to send more detailed information about the firm, including a brief company history, recent financial reports, and a list of technical achievements."
We don't call increases in demand 'induced demand' unless we're trying to throw shade on the thing being demanded. The classical case is road use. Add lanes to highways and folks will utilize the capacity to do whatever it is that creates value to them. And we call it induced demand.
If transit headways shrink and there are more riders because the service got better, we don't call it induced demand. Or if milk or eggs get cheaper and consumption of those items grows, it's also not induced demand.
>What is the commercial utility in such a large launch platform?
It's a very interesting question. Much like StarLink, I suspect he has some other plan for monetising this lift capability. I don't buy the Moon base/Mars base plan at all.
From my perspective Mars is kind of a fantasy. If we actually wanted or needed to go to Mars it'd have happened right after the first moon missions. It's very risky and the returns from a manned mission aren't really apparent
On the other hand, you clearly can't call it a complete success. There were three goals that weren't met: water-landing the booster, reaching orbit (or whatever you call where it was trying to get to), and water-landing Starship.
So maybe we should think in terms of a score out of 10. Like with gymnastics, there are degrees of difficulty. SpaceX aimed very high, and delivered...ok. Maybe give them a 6/10?